Pat Bainter: The most influential man in Florida GOP politics you don't know

It was after 2 a.m. and Democrat Buddy MacKay was beating Republican Connie Mack by roughly 10,000 votes in the 1988 campaign for Florida’s vacant U.S. Senate seat. The Ocala Star-Banner was ready to call the race.

The next morning, 5,000 copies carried the front-page headline “Hey Buddy, you’re a Senator.” It was a play on “Hey Buddy, you’re a liberal,” an attack used by Mack during the campaign. The problem is Mack won after absentee ballots, which were counted last, swung the race by more than 40,000 votes.

“Me and my buddies all went down to Ocala putting quarters in all the paper boxes,” said Pat Bainter, owner of Data Targeting, one of Florida’s biggest GOP political consulting firms. “We wanted as many copies [of the paper] as we could get.”

Bainter’s firm was helping handle the Mack campaign’s data analysis, which put him in a position to understand the tide would turn. Using data is considered common place in the contemporary campaign playbook, but was cutting edge at the time.

“I think his expansion in polling and how to use data, and what the numbers mean, was really a key factor in the firm’s growth,” said Brian Hughes, owner of Meteoric Media Strategies, a political public relations firm that works with Data Targeting on many political campaigns.

A lawsuit claiming the state’s congressional maps are at odds with anti-gerrymandering provisions in the constitution has cast a searing statewide spotlight on Bainter’s role as sort of a Wizard of Oz in state politics. His firm’s presence can be felt nearly everywhere, but little is known about the man pulling the levers.

That’s by design.

Data Targeting is in a non-descript building in downtown Gainesville, far away from Tallahassee, the state’s political center. It has no sign, and if you look up its location online, the address listed isn’t the office’s location. Despite its size, Data Targeting has no web site, and before last Monday, Bainter had done just one media interview in 29 years.

“I’ve never been good with appearing in public, I have a tough time with crowds, and the nature of the company kind of reflects that,” the 55-year-old Bainter said during an interview with the Scripps-Tribune Capitol Bureau. Bainter, under fire in recent months over his firm’s role in the state’s 2012 redistricting process that a judge determined unfairly favored Republicans, took the unusual step last week of asking for an opportunity to tell his side of the redistricting case to the Scripps-Tribune Capital Bureau.

He said he has no need to be in Tallahassee because he does not lobby state lawmakers. Bainter is blunt about what he thinks of the intersection of political consulting and lobbying: “I don’t like that.”

When he has traveled there in the past, Bainter used to eat on the outdoor porch of the now-shuttered downtown Po’ Boys Creole Café. It was a favorite of politicos looking to grab lunch within walking distance of both the state Capitol and rows of lobbying firms that line the city’s downtown streets.

Despite state political insiders regularly dining at the New Orleans-themed spot, Bainter often went unnoticed.

“Unless, you know, clients happen to be there, nobody knew.” Bainter said. “It has kind of been the way I’ve always operated.”

Wearing jeans and a casual button up shirt, Bainter was seated in his small office just inside the firm’s second story location. On his desk sit three computer monitors. The married father of two children lines his walls with pictures of some of his non-political loves: his family, including his father Stan Bainter, the former Republican state representative from Eustis; and tractor pulls.

“It’s a rare set of rather bizarre circumstance that got me to this point,” said Bainter, who graduated from the University of Florida with a biology degree.

His firm started as a small operation in the late 1980s – its first client was former Lake County Commissioner Mike Bakich – and had grown into a one-stop political shop that does mail, polling, opposition research, and general consulting for, among many others, the Republican Party of Florida, a lengthy roster of state candidates, and elected officials and groups in more than a dozen states across the country.

Since the 2012 election cycle, the firm has worked for more than a half dozen Florida Republican congressional candidates, earning more than $1.8 million from those campaigns, including U.S. Reps. David Jolly and Gus Bilirakis, federal campaign finance reports show.

During that election cycle, as lawmakers were drawing the maps, Data Targeting was paid $5.5 million for campaign work, much of which came from the state GOP.

It’s that status as one of Florida’s top political influencers that led to a collection of voting rights groups to include Data Targeting as “non-parties” in their lawsuit. The plaintiffs, led by the League of Women Voters of Florida, sued the Legislature in 2012, claiming the congressional maps were drawn to favor the GOP.

Leon Circuit Judge Terry Lewis agreed, and the maps were redrawn during a special legislative session. Lewis approved those maps, a decision that’s being appealed by the plaintiffs.

The coalition suing the lawmakers pulled Data Targeting into the case because they say Bainter and other GOP consultants conspired with lawmakers to draw the GOP-friendly congressional seats. In court filings, attorneys for the firm said it is simply “caught in the crossfire” in “a heavyweight bout between the country’s two major political parties.”

Much of the plaintiff’s legal bills have been paid for by the Democratic Redistricting Trust, a national group setup by party operatives to fund the redistricting lawsuit. Bainter’s legal bills have been paid for by the state GOP, a point Bainter would not talk about during the interview.

“I’m not going down that road,” he said.

He did say that he thought national Democratic groups were jumping on the opportunity to try and get information about how some of the company’s data systems work.

“They are saying we want to recreate what has kicked our ass at the ballot box,” Bainter said.

Bainter fought attempts to get his firm to turn over hundreds of pages of documents and make his testimony public. Earlier this month, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the documents and testimony should be unsealed.

The document dump revealed that attorneys for the plaintiffs focused on the fact that third-parties were recruited to submit maps worked on by Data Targeting and other consultants.

“Did you have maps in your possession that you got third parties to file that you had prepared or that your friends had prepared,” said David King, who represents the group challenging the congressional maps.

It was among a series of questions while Bainter was on the stand during a May hearing. Lewis, the Tallahassee judge, closed the courtroom while Bainter testified, a move fought by media organizations, including Scripps Newspapers. His testimony was released as part of the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling.

Bainter, in an interview, said the case hits on loftier legal questions about whether anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendments made political consultants “second class citizens” who can’t participate in the process to the same degree as other citizens.

“At the end of the day, I pay attention to politics. Of course I know more than most people,” Bainter told Scripps-Tribune. “Does that take away my right to free speech, to petition my government?”

He defends the strategy of using third-parties to submit proposed maps as part of the Legislature’s formal redistricting process.

“I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t,” he said. “If I submit maps in my name…than that is made into a spectacle. The individual lawmakers themselves would be put in some conflict.”

Among the documents that were originally sealed under court order were 538 emails the firm fought to protect. They highlight chatter between a handful of political consultants working to shape districts at all levels. At one point, they took pains to be discrete about strategies for recruiting people to submit maps.

“Pat and I will probably sound almost paranoid on this over the next week, but it will be so much more worthwhile to be cautious,” wrote Matt Mitchell, a firm staff member who is also one of the non-parties in the case.

In response, Jessica Corbett, a consultant with elecioneeringconsulting.com, said she agreed and had been doing “most of the asking over the phone, so there is no e-mail trail,” she wrote in the Nov. 2011 email exchange.

Bainter has a simple answer to people who highlight the use of third-parties to submit maps for political consultants: “So what?”

He argues the system consisted of people with similar political viewpoints organizing to petition their government, which is constitutional.

“How often do school teachers write a senator or state legislator at the behest of the teachers union?” Bainter said. “I support their right to do that.